By
Bhushan Akolkar
May 10th, 2024
Amid the rising popularity of the CryptoPunk NFTs, scammers are targeting key players. A founder of an NFT videogame recently fell prey to one such bot scam on the CryptoPunks Discord channel.
CryptoPunk NFTs have created a massive rage in the booming NFT market. Thus, losing these precious tokens could be a major pain for NFT enthusiasts.
As per the latest report, scammers managed to steal 16 CryptoPunk NFTs along with some ETH from the founder of an NFT videogame. Stazie, the pseudonymous developer of NFT game Hedgie wrote:
“I lost my punks and a bunch of ETH. I was lying in bed yesterday evening, mind was very foggy, casually browsing. Saw this bot in Discord and clicked the link. The site looked like Cryptopunks, and had a popup that looked like Metamask saying something like the security was compromised, and asking to enter the seed phrase to restore the wallet connection to the site.”
The scammer operating under “cryptopunksbot” posted in the CryptoPunk’s discord channel. Citing the four-year celebration of CryptoPunk NFTs, the scammer offered the chance to win ten elusive avatars.
However, the reported domain has now come under the phishing list of MetaMask. Post the hack, the founder also found out that there’s no bulk transfer on OpenSea. But it was too late by then.
The fact that the founder has been in the crypto space since 2017 is even more embarrassing. This shows that even experience market players can fall prey to market scams.
CryptoPunk NFT Prices on a Steep Rise
CryptoPunks are blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These are basically images of punky-looking characters each having its own unique and distinct characteristics. All the Punks are classified as Alien, Ape, Zombie and Human. The CryptoPunks collection is a limited series of 10,000 such NFTs.
Over the last week, the CryptoPunk NFTs have been in major demand. The CryptoPunk NFT prices shot to the roof as an Ethereum whale was on a buying spree. An Ethereum whale purchased over 100 CryptoPunk NFTs for a massive $6 million.
This shot up the price from an average of 22 ETH to 29 ETH. Interestingly, all the purchases took place from a newly created wallet. Thus, there were no historical traces for the same.
Last week, media mogul and popular influencer Gary Vaynerchuk also scooped a CryptoPunk NFT for a massive $3.7 million or 1600 ETH. On the same day, another anonymous investor spent $7 million or 2700 ETH purchasing over 88 CryptoPunk NFTs.
Amid the solid demand for NFts this year, CryptoPunks has emerged as a valuable project in this space. Over the last week, the trading volumes for CryptoPunk NFTs reached a massive $60 million. Besides, the daily trading volume for CryptoPunk NFTs has also surged by 1342%.
As per the data from NFT marketplace OpenSea, at least the 10 most expensive CryptoPunks have been trading in circulation over the past weekend.